Endgame
' Endgame' is a Doctor Who comic strip. It has been printed through various publications. Synopsis On horseback, Marwood pursues and kills a man named Felix. The TARDIS arrives in the valley below, in the village of Stockbridge, but things are not as familiar as they should be, and the Doctor is soon attacked by grotesquely doll-like people. He is saved by Izzy Sinclair and Maxwell Edison who tell him that Stockbridge has been invaded by aliens. However, Marwood arrives and disputes this. Izzy has a pendant named the Focus that belongs to him. He and his fox-headed huntsmen give chase as the Doctor, Max and Izzy run for the TARDIS. But the Celestial Toymaker is waiting for them. The Toymaker reveals that the village is not the real Stockbridge and demands a rematch, but the Doctor and Izzy escape into the TARDIS. Max is sadly caught. Izzy explains that two days’ before, she and Max returned to Stockbridge to find it strangely changed and all the people either missing or possessed. They met Felix, who was Marwood’s adjutant, who had stolen the Focus. He charged Izzy and Max with getting it away from Stockbridge. The Doctor thinks the real Stockbridge is close by and disengages the TARDIS’ sub-spatial gyros to get there, but the Toymaker has them and the whole village trapped in a snow globe. Realising the stakes, the Doctor and Izzy return to the Toymaker’s version of Stockbridge to play the games set for them. Entering a floating castle, they are drawn into the Toymaker’s domain where the Toymaker forces the Doctor to play a deadly game of hangman... with Izzy on the gallows. He loses and surrenders the Focus, which is part of a contraption known as the Imagineum, a device capable to transmuting raw light into matter itself. The Toymaker uses it to create a champion to defeat the Doctor... a twisted version of the Time Lord himself. Izzy and Max are pursued by the fox-headed huntsmen in a game of Mousetrap while the Doctor battles himself. However, as his destruction seems inevitable, he tells his evil duplicate that the Toymaker will never set him free and will always keep him as a plaything. The duplicate stops to listen. Izzy and Max, meanwhile, turn the tables on the huntsmen and drop a large weight on them, just as in the traditional game. Marwood is distraught at the demise of his little foxes and turns on the Toymaker, who casually kills him. This act is enough to convince the Doctor’s duplicate that the Doctor speaks the truth. While he distracts the Toymaker, the Doctor uses the Imagineum to create a duplicate Toymaker who drags the real Toymaker back to the shadow dimensions, locked in perpetual stalemate. The Doctor’s duplicate then destroys the Imagineum and himself. With the Toymaker gone, the fake Stockbridge begins to break apart. Max finds the real village locked in the snowglobe, actually a macro-dimensional linkage device and the Doctor is able to transpose the containment vectors to restore the village. The Doctor invites both Max and Izzy aboard the TARDIS, but only Izzy accepts. Imaginary Friends: Maxwell Edison Middle-aged Maxwell Edison lives in Stockbridge, and previously encountered the Fifth Doctor in the story Stars Fell On Stockbridge. There, Max, a UFO chaser known to his neighbours as a crackpot, was able to earn a little credibility in the village community, but it seems that this credibility eventually wore thin leaving Max much the same as before, though he does at least now have a friend in the form of Izzy Sinclair, who joined him in his Bureau for Interplanetary Liason - a group extending the hand of friendship to visiting aliens. He puts in cameo appearances in A Life of Matter and Death, The Fallen and manages two in The Glorious Dead, where we learn that he and Izzy once challenged a group of philosophy students from Winchester to the pub quiz at the Redfern Inn in Stockbridge and beat them thoroughly. We see him again at the end of Oblivion, when the Doctor returns Izzy home on the same day she left with him. Max most recently crossed over onto audio in Big Finish’s Eternal Summer, released in November 2009. Imaginary Friends: Izzy Sinclair - Part One Izzy, who was born on 12 October 1979 (making her exactly the same age as Doctor Who Magazine), lived in Stockbridge, the adopted daughter of Sandra and Les who ran the Redfern Inn pub. She was abandoned by her real parents at a bus shelter when she was only a few hours old. Sandra and Max, who she refused to call Mum and Dad, told her the truth when she was eight, which hurt her a great deal. She claimed everything after that point felt unreal, hence persumably her escape into fantasy. She imagined she was really an alien princess and that her real parents would return from space to take her back to their homeworld. In her late teens, she spent much of her time with Maxwell Edison exploring unexplained phenomena. She is something of a loner, and also a science fiction and fantasy fan, mentioning Star Trek, The X-Files, Star Wars, Terry Pratchett, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Wonder Woman, Wallace and Gromit, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lara Croft, Sigourney Weaver, Battlestar Galactica, and according to the Doctor in The Final Chapter, she also reads a lot of Iain M. Banks. She also used to love a Japanese cartoon series featuring the Neo-Osaka Robotrox Warmaster, which is what the Lady Asami creates to destroy her and the Doctor in The Road to Hell. In The Keep we learn that she has been on the Twister at Alton Towers. In Tooth and Claw we learn that she is allergic to garlic and also unable to swim. Luckily, Fey Truscott-Sade is at hand to save her from drowning. Both of them take the Doctor back to Gallifrey when he is mortally wounded defeating the Cucurbite, but when he appears to regenerate at the conclusion of The Final Chapter, Izzy has a difficult time accepting the new man, and is indeed the first person to discover the trick that the Doctor has been playing on the Threshold. In destroying the Ion Shield that protected Wormwood, she prevents the Pariah’s plans for total destruction by blowing up the moon. She is deeply upset when Fey, having bonded with Shayde, leaves the TARDIS, and it is obvious that there is a great closeness between them. In The Fallen, we also learn of her best friend Carrie for whom she had deeper feelings. It is at Izzy’s request that the Doctor saves Katsura Sato using nano-drones in The Road to Hell, a move that dooms Sato to eternal life and turns Earth into the oppressed world of Dhakan. However, it is also Izzy who saves the day, making Sato realise his mistake and Kroton realise his full potential. When she meets Destrii, she finally believes she has met a kindred spirit, but Destrii tricks her into swapping bodies, and this is when Izzy’s real problems begin. Notes * The Comics Website Altered Vistas had this to say about the strip: A return to Stockbridge, ancestral home of the Doctor Who Magazine strip, is a neat idea that effectively cements the Eighth Doctor into the fabric of the comic strip, while the return of the Celestial Toymaker (last seen on our screens in 1966) places him in the same televisual continuum as the other seven Doctors. This was possibly seen as an important thing to do, given that the Eighth Doctor had only been seen in one television story. The story itself is a strong one, with dashes of surrealism that evoke The Tides of Time and Voyager, and many arresting images, such as the Doctor battling through a nightmare version of Snakes and Ladders, and the fox-headed huntsmen. There is a nice in-joke here as the Doctor refers to ‘old Mrs Parkhouse’. This is a strong start to the era of the Eighth Doctor. *There is an Osirian grimoire in the TARDIS library, it tingles Izzy's fingers when she picks it up because it's alive. The Doctor apparently went through a great deal to collect that volume, commenting that Izzy "has no idea how much trouble it was to get that". Prints *Doctor Who Magazine **Issue 244 **Issue 245 **Issue 246 **Issue 247 *Panini Graphic Novels **Endgame Category:Doctor Who Magazine comic strips Category:Comics Category:Eighth Doctor comic strips